The Big Brother Theme – Gentium font and Polish characters
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There were some issues with Polish characters in The Big Brother Theme, see this thread:
https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/the-big-brother-theme-inconsistent-typography
One of those problems was resolved. It was suggested that I post here to draw validator’s attention to the remaining issue.
The issue is that Gentium font, while quite nice in itself, does not support Polish characters. Default glyphs that appear in their place are visibly larger and heavier, especially with italics. This often results in ugly text, like here:
In the other thread it was suggested that turning Gentium font “off” is probably the best solution.
Now, a while back I helped to push this theme’s Polish translation to 100%. I tried to set it to “off” back then just to see if that fixes my blog’s typography. However, this change wasn’t accepted.
I’m not sure what the fallback font is. Perhaps it looks much worse overall and having some inconsistent characters is in fact better option. Perhaps it’s worth reconsideration, though.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi filipluszczyk,
I’m going to contact the validator and see how she thinks. Thanks for your feedback!
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In fact, that font supports latin extended characters, and those are how they are supposed to look.
http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Gentium+Basic
I agree the characters “ą”, “ę”, and “ł” look slightly bolder on some browsers – but the differences are very subtle and the validator decided to go with the default web font.
I see this as more of a matter of preference than a bug, since another user is seeing the current style as an acceptable appearance in Polish. In that case, only thing I can suggest is to use Custom Design upgrade to tweak the CSS (i.e. remove the Gentium web font, etc.). Please let us know if you hear any different opinions from your readers or fellow bloggers.
I hope you understand – thank you so much for your feedback. -
Hi there,
I am the validator that approved Gentium as a font for this theme :). As I promised Naoko, me and my dev friend did some investigating and finally, contrary to what I wrote to Naoko before, we agreed it would be best to turn Gentium off for the Polish language in this and in all other themes that would use it. Here’s why.Gentium as a font (not Google Font) does support all neccessary characters (see: http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/render_download.php?format=file&media_id=Gentium_RU_spec&filename=Gentium_RU_spec.pdf and http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentium). I have it installed and I use it very frequently for my design projects. For me it’s kind of the default go-to font when I need support for multiple languages, it has loads of characters that an ordinary person never dreamt of existing ;). However…
The Google Fonts version does not include Polish characters even in its latin extended subset. This causes browsers to substitute missing characters with the closest font possible, in this case the “enlarged” characters in fact come from the Georgia font (looks similar, but different). If you examine the character set on Google Fonts page (http://www.google.com/fonts), you will find core Polish diacritics missing! Even in the Latin Extended version of the font. Which is why the browsers cannot load them.
Finally, my working hypothesis is that when I did the “Zażółć gęślą jaźń” check on the Gentium font and saw it working correctly, the browser used the full font I have installed on my laptop to show all Polish characters and this is why I thought it was working fine and why it showed nicely on the screenshot I sent to Naoko.
To sum up: the fix I’d proposed with adding ‘latin-ext’ attribute in the
<head>section of the theme would work in all cases where the font HAS the required characters in the Latin Extended subset (and should be implemented within all WordPress themes). But GoogleFonts!Gentium does not have all required characters – and this is why it should be turned off (and I am turning it off now).I do hope this helps!
Best wishes,
Aldona -
Thanks.
Are you specifically limited to Google Fonts? Would it be possible and legal for the dev to add a font from a different source, or add the file directly into the theme?
Apparently Gentium has a number of variants. Google Fonts features Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic (which also doesn’t include Polish glyphs). The one you have installed on your laptop must be a different, non-basic variant.
English wiki has more extensive info than that Polish article you link and lists all variations:
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Hi there! Just wanted to follow up about your questions regarding the font choices with our themes.
Are you specifically limited to Google Fonts?
The default font for the theme is chosen by the theme author. Google Fonts are the most common choice because they are free and open source. Other fonts are possible but sometimes require using a paid service, so Google Fonts are a more common default choice.
We also offer a paid plan where you can use other fonts. We work with Typekit as our font provider—the cost for serving those fonts is offset by the price of the plan.
Would it be possible and legal for the dev to add a font from a different source, or add the file directly into the theme?
Both possible and legal, but also at a cost and for a service as large as WordPress.com there are also partnership agreements to consider (i.e. our font partner is Typekit).
I hope that answers your questions. Let me know if I can help with anything else.
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